Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood? What were you like as a child? 

I was very quiet in most situations. I had an older brother who I adored and he would take me around. We would do all kinds of stuff like going swimming in a pool that was made by a contractor who was digging, was getting gravel. This was outside of Chicago area. And the last glacier ended right there and dropped a lot of gravel in a lot of areas. So there was a gravel pit there and it filled up with water when they hit the water table and that was the end of that for them, but it made a wonderful swimming hole for us. So we would go down to the gravel pit and go swimming. I wasn't, my brother was three years older and of course he could, he was physically stronger than I was, but he saved my life down there as we were swimming across the thing. It was large and deep and we were swimming across and I couldn't make it. I was lagging behind and I was making it about 50-60% of the length there but he came back and did the old Boy Scout swimming rescue, and swam me over to the other side, and I went with him. So, he was a very good guy. He was always helping people, and he helped me and I was happy about it. It was different when I was a child. It was in the 1940s. 

I was born in 1940, so it was considerably different. Not a lot of people had any real money of any kind, and that didn't worry anybody. Of course, there was a war there going on as well. But our clothing was pretty much like the movie Christmas Story. If you've seen the movie Christmas Story, there's not very many colors in the clothing. And that was exactly how a neighborhood looked and felt, but you don't notice that that's different than what it is today because, of course, it was at the time. So it was a very pleasant childhood. I had a great time. 

We would go sledding in the winter. We'd hop rides on cars by holding on to their bumpers in the wintertime. We did all kinds of strange stuff. I actually shot my sister with a BB gun. A little bit rougher time. Yeah, it was a little bit different. But we had a nice time and we had a great childhood.

One of the better ones was, of course, as children, you're always interested in doing things adult, so my brother somehow got some cigarettes and we were, oh, that's Father Parker's. He's throwing something down the stairs. Yeah. And he had got a couple of cigarettes someplace, and of course, I must have been about eight years old. So we were out in the back of the garage and we lit up a cigarette. And our mother found us out there, probably wondering where the heck the smoke was coming from. So she was a Finnish woman, very straightforward. So she went out and bought a cigar, and she made us smoke half of it, one half each, hoping to impress us that we would get a little sick from that. I was the only one that did. My brother said, oh, I'll smoke the first half.

So we sat on the cellar stairs while she was doing a wash down there. And so he smoked the first half of the cigar. Well, he had a lot more experience than I did, knowing that the second half of the cigar is very strong. So I was very dizzy and upset when I left the cellar and I met my brother outside. He was just happy. That was great. He got a free smoke. So it was all like that. 

And my grandparents lived up in Minnesota. We only had a grandmother on my mother's side at that point, and well, she did marry another man. Our grandfather died in like 1927 in a mine, in a taconite mine, which is crude. They were able to be able to handle taconite and make it useful in terms of making a profit. So there were taconite mines as well as iron ore mines. And he got killed in a rock slide in the mine.

And she later married in the very early 40s. And I never knew her. I only saw her a couple of times up in Minnesota. But I was just a very small kid. You know, I mean, I was no older than two. And I'm crawling around the house. I guess that was the wedding day. And I'm crawling around there, but you can't understand anybody because everything was in Finnish. And that's a very strange language. It's quite different. It's related to Magyar. And really different. Tongue action and whatever.

So I had met her there, but the thing that always struck me as being somewhat funny is that the jokes about Norwegians and Finns up in Minnesota, there's special jokes about them.

And like Ole—well, his name was Ole. Ole and Lena were the famous ones. Ole was not very bright and Lena was cool. But this guy's name was Ole and he was a nice guy. I met them one other time.

And then she died of cancer, so we only had one grandparent on my father's side up in a place called Wolf, Minnesota, which is a county, I believe up in northern Minnesota, about 50 miles from the border.

What are you proudest of personally and professionally in your life?

Personally, I'm happy for the personality that I have. We're not interested in judging people or considering what we do as what is right or that we are the smartest people in the world. But I was born with a curiosity, particularly about science, and also sociology, also how development, biology, all kinds of little things. So I'm really happy with the working knowledge. Seventy-five years old, an engineer, and I opened up a poetry book I've had for quite a while and was looking at that again. It was very, very nice. How the English language is used. How our language developed is the greatest thing. That's a fun thing to do. So I like the life I have.

And I'm not going to be judgmental about people who are different than I am. As far as I'm concerned, they're just informing me about the breadth of life. I certainly would defend against people who would try to harm my family or me.

I'm not outside of going in a criminality sort of situation or a war situation. No, my goal is to be friendly and helpful. That's it. In the area of work, profession, I was an aeronautical engineer. They changed it to aerospace, and I don't know what the heck they are now. But we did not deal with dynamics of non-atmosphere flight or planetary motions or any of that. We were not in that thing. It didn't exist. We were making and doing things that were in the flight of normal environments, earthly environments. So that was fun. And I really did enjoy that. We worked on a lot of very good things. Of course, I had some great aunts that were very religious in a different way than I am.

They thought it was just terrible because I made weapons. And I was not worried philosophically about, oh, they might be used. I was not like that. So I made them because I wanted to make them.

Okay? And those weapons were missiles, air-to-air, air-to-ground, ICBMs, IRBMs. And we made—but the last one was very, very interesting. Great, great fun. You were more experienced as an engineer on that last group.

This was an anti-ICBM missile. It wasn't made for smaller missiles, IRBMs, Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles. It's Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. So you're hitting a missile, and a missile warhead is very small. It's not big.

At that point, it might have been about four feet tall and maybe two feet in diameter, maybe two and a half feet in diameter. And that would have a hell of a warhead on it, that warhead.

That's all that's coming in on a ballistic flight. And that warhead would take, you know, how many times better than Hiroshima and those things. Many, many times better than that. And it's coming in very fast and it's very small. So it's not like it's easy to see. You're going to eventually see it from the heat track and the shockwave it's making, but it's so small. But the missile I worked on would shoot that thing down. It would kill warheads. So it was, as I was mentioning before, it wasn't a weapon system that was made to fight the war, fight a nuclear war with the Russians. It wasn't made for that purpose. It was made for mistakes. If the Russians had a general that went crazy and had the ability to launch without authority or on his own authority, which could very easily happen, we could be talking to a Russian premier, and the premier is saying, we've had a missile launch, or several missiles launched from a farm, and they're heading to you. And we'd say, okay, we have them picked up. And he'll be confirming that those are only ones that are gonna be there. So at that point, we have maybe seven ICBMs with nuclear warheads coming our way. And then under those conditions, we could bring every one of those down. And that would be in 1967. We could bring them down. They don't really, you can't shoot them out of the air, you're not in the air, you're in space. We could go and be orbiting in a two-stage situation, which was very unusual, still unusual. You still use three stages to get up enough velocity out of each stage so that they add together to get an escape velocity.

We could get escape velocity with two stages and be orbiting if we wanted to be. And at that same time, that missile, that third stage of that missile does not push it. It pulls it. The warhead's behind the third stage.

This third stage could guide it. It could do its own guidance and hit. So you're thousands of miles out and in space, and you're picking this thing off before it's even coming on a down trajectory. So you don't blow it up. You're in space. There's no shockwave there.

There's nothing to have a shockwave. The only thing you have is particles that your bomb blows apart that make up the third stage and the bomb itself and the bomb case itself. So that isn't enough. So you say, how do you shoot it down? You don't. You shoot it down with radiation.

Nuclear weapons are not just something that goes boom. In fact, going boom in space doesn't mean much. So your nuclear weapons for fighting in space are enhanced radiation weapons. The United States wanted to give Europe what was called a neutron bomb in the 60s, early 70s. Maybe it was the 70s. And the neutron bomb, that nuclear reaction that's making that weapon produces a lot of high-energy neutrons that are going to penetrate anything on the ground and kill all mammalian life, but not hurt anything. The buildings will all still be there. Everything will be there. It's just that mammalian life won't be. And, of course, that is very good for the fact that the Russians on the East German border and Poland and whatever have tank forces, which we always like to have, that are four times greater than ours. So we can't defend ourselves against the Russian tanks. If they launch World War III and they launch those tanks crossing Germany, you don't have enough firepower to stop them in a tank-to-tank.

There are other things that you had that were unique. People don't know much about them today, but they were very unique. One was that you had, across the whole German area there and northern area you had nuclear landmines. They weren't going to get very far. You had some other weapons that would work, too. But you didn't have the tanks to stop them. So if it's a real surprise, not everything works as you think it's going to. So they're going to get across and, well, the neutron bomb would kill everybody in the tanks and eventually they'll run out of gas. But there's nobody in them to fire anything or steer or do anything. They're all dead. And nothing is disturbed. Nothing else is disturbed. But the Europeans didn't want that. It bothered their sensibilities, so they rejected that idea as a way to defend. And the United States really controls NATO at that time. So they said, OK, no, we won't do that. Instead, we had a tremendous number of nuclear weapons and storages in Europe. All heavily radiation, fighting with them will kill everybody and still blow up everything. They liked that better. They didn't want the enemy dead, they wanted everybody dead.

It was not a very, it's not an engineer way of thinking. So that, not just the fact of war as a war lover or anything like that, but you're working on things that nobody has ever done before. Nobody in the high-consequence yeah in a high-consequence area that's all very limited knowledge right of who's doing what the home and you had to have the need to know that's inherent with all military secrets or any secrets are the need to know.